New Plays on Broadway

Sweet Bird of Youth (by Tennessee Williams) is very close to parody, but the wonder is that Williams should be so inept at imitating himself. The sex violence, the perfumed decay, the hacking domestic quarrels, the dirge of fear and self-pity, the characters who dangle in neurotic limbo--all are present--but only like so many dramatic dead cats on a cold tin roof.

In essence, Bird copies Cat. This time, the heroine is not a childless young wife, but a fading movie queen, Ariadne de Lago (Geraldine Page). The ineffectual young man, Chance Wayne (Paul Newman), is a sexual athlete, but an impotent failure as the actor he wants to be. The has-been and the would-be smoke hashish ("Moroccan, and the finest") and saunter to the footlights to tell their sordid life stories in monologue.

In Act II, on strides "Big Daddy." This time he is Boss Finley (Sidney Blackmer) a demogogic Southern politician, and he wears a yellow dressing gown instead of Burl Ives's white one. The first Big Daddy psychologically emasculated his son; this one threatens Chance Wayne with physical castration. It seems that Heavenly, the Boss's daughter, contracted a disease from Chance years ago and had to have a hysterectomy. In scenes of bogus dramaturgy, Boss Finley and his children snarl revelations at each other (e.g., he keeps a mistress) that should have been common family knowledge for years. Toward play's end, in a scene made memorable through Actress Page's brilliant use of that feeblest of theatrical inventions, the telephone, Ariadne de Lago learns that Hollywood wants her back. As she departs for future glories, Chance, ex-youth sans hope, awaits the Boss's vengeance.

The moral? Youth is Short and Art is Long. Bird is fond of its plumage of ideas. Samples: 1) time "hardens people." 2) life is "wild dreams," 3) the significant difference between human beings is whether or not they have pleasure in love.

Playwright Williams' instinct for the theatrical jugular makes even this mannikin play bleed greasepaint. Elia Kazan's direction is intense, Jo Mielziner's sets are broodily menacing, and Paul Bowles's mood music shimmers. But the only unfailing source of power and passion in the play is the bravura performance of Geraldine Page. Whether she is thrashing about in bed crying for her oxygen mask after a days-long vodka-and-goofball binge or clawing apart her hired paramour's tape-recorded blackmail scheme, Actress Page is just what the character she plays fears, "the tiger in the nerves jungle." Whenever she stalks offstage, the play exits with her.

Whatever its shortcomings, Bird opened with the sweet smell of commercial success in its beak. The advance ticket sale reached $390,000, and the screen rights were sold to M-G-M for a sliding-scale sum that may reach $400,000. A long Broadway run was assured when the seven critics of the Manhattan dailies, seemingly under the sway of collective hypnosis, unanimously hailed the Williams drama. Said the Herald Tribune's Walter Kerr: "Enormously exciting." The Times's Brooks Atkinson called it "one of Mr. Williams' finest dramas." The most startling display of devotion came from the Post's Richard Watts, who said the play had a "haunting fascination" but poked three logical holes in the script, then concluded: "It must be a tribute to the play that such queries did disturb me."

A Raisin in the Sun (by Lorraine Hansberry) is the first play by a Negro woman playwright ever to reach Broadway. It is also the first Broadway play in decades directed by a Negro (Lloyd Richards), and all but one member of its cast are Negroes. All this would be the small talk of theatrical statistics if Raisin in the Sun were not a work of genuine dramatic merit. Playwright Hansberry, 28, has brought to her well-crafted play the gifts of intelligence, honesty and humor, a saving absence of racial partisanship, and a moving ability to use the language of the heart.

Raisin belongs to the long and simple annals of the poor. Three generations of the Younger family are packed in a sunless Chicago South Side tenement flat. There is white-haired, wide-girthed Mother Younger (Claudia McNeil), a matriarchal Rock of Gibraltar; her son Walter Lee (Sidney Poitier), 35, who finds his chauffeur's uniform a strait jacket; his younger sister Beneatha (Diana Sands), a race-conscious progressive who wants to be a doctor; Walter's wife Ruth (Ruby Dee), who yearns for a grassy reprieve from the soot-and-asphalt jungle; and the Youngers' small boy Travis (Glynn Turman), whose main problem is to be first in the communal bathroom down the hall.

"A man's got a dream," fumes Walter, "and his wife says, 'Eat your eggs.' " Walter has the money virus; he is feverish for a partnership in a liquor store. But all the Younger dreams revolve around the $10,000 insurance money that widowed Mother is to receive. When the fateful check arrives, Mother asks little Travis to count the zeros, and then plunks down $3,500 in part payment for a house in the suburbs--an all-white suburb, as it happens. After a thwarted Walter takes to drink, and lets his pregnant wife consult an abortionist, Mother Younger gives him the other $6,500 to prove his mettle. Poor Walter promptly gets fleeced as his partner skips town. After that, the Youngers must fight to keep their "pinch of dignity."

Raisin might be somber, or merely sentimental, if its milieu were not so sharply observed, its speech so flavorful, and its infectious sense of fun so caustic. Much of the laughter wells up around Beneatha, a girl of earnest intellectual fads. When a Nigerian boy friend introduces her to a bit of African lore, she promptly decks herself out as "the queen of the Nile," and whirls across the room to click off a jazz program ("Enough of this assimilationist junk").

The team play of the cast is superb, yet each individual performance has a distinctive tone. Claudia McNeil, as Mother Younger, has the fullest emotional range and the most commanding presence. She can draw laughter and tears from a single line, as she does when she clutches a gift of shiny gardening tools to her ample bosom and says: "Now I don't have to use my knives and forks no more." Sidney Poitier puts sledgehammer force into a part that is often wordless frustration.

Like the Youngers, Lorraine Hansberry was born in Chicago, but her late father was a well-to-do real estate man. She quit the University of Wisconsin after two years ("I was the rebellious young girl"). In the book-lined Greenwich Village apartment she shares with her white husband, Robert Nemiroff, a music publisher, she is currently at work on the libretto for a musical drama. Playwright Hansberry has given her play some traditional bread-and-butter virtues--conflict, a valid moral struggle, character development, and people one can care about and respect. "He came into his manhood today," says Mother Younger of her son Walter. "Wasn't that a fine thing to see?" It is, and so is the appearance of a fine, fresh playwriting talent in the American theater.

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